Jenn Thảo Nguyễn

“I cannot shield you from these structures of belief or their profound and abiding effects on you. But I can complicate and unearth them with you” – Julietta Singh, The Breaks

As I take this class, I am struck by how often our course material intersects with my day-to-day life. This week, while visiting several archives, I came across the term “anecdata” — the practice of sharing failures alongside successes to help others avoid similar mistakes. The archival field is ever-shifting, shaped by practitioners working against time and profit paradigms. There is little room for the “new”, only for the “fix” — quick solutions that resist standardization. Yet each fix contains a newness: a breakthrough or inherited issue meant to prolong life. This concept resonates deeply with Singh’s work, which offers her anecdata and invites her daughter — and us — to choose from the mother’s archive what we wish to carry into the “new world”, one shaped from the breaks of a fading one.

The idea of breaks also opens up another reading on maternal interruptions. Singh describes her hospitalization as “an interruption to my capacity to care for you”, her daughter, adding depth to Lisa Baraitser’s theory. In Singh’s case, the absence of the child’s interjection — those interruptions that define maternal time — may have disrupted her own process of becoming a mother. This rupture seems to generate a new subjectivity, one Singh explores through the epistolary form. Ocean Vuong calls the letter one of the highest-stakes modes of writing, where each word is charged by the presence of an intended reader. In researching Omah Diegu’s film ahead of our screening, I was moved to find that it too is framed as a letter from mother to child.

I think back to our conversations on distance — how the materiality of a letter is preserved both at the micro-level (for a child yearning for a no-longer-tangible mother, as in Mona Hatoum’s film) and at the macro level, through archives that recognize the value of mothers passing down their motherwit. These preserved intimacies seem to anticipate a larger rupture: Singh’s declining health and the planet’s fragility bearing down on her child; Diegu’s fight for her son’s German citizenship, not just for belonging but for futurity. A fight that may end in the most painful break of all — separation. And yet, these letters endure because they offer a way to sustain the motherbond through rupture.

To break with someone, I suppose, becomes possible within the container of a letter. It allows us to enter an archive of mother history that is both time-bound and timeless — a reservoir of care and knowledge. Read through Barthes’ notion of the writerly text, these letters are not simply received; they are co-authored — inviting us to participate in the archive’s meaning-making process. “Breaking with” is not abandonment, but transformation — a deconstruction made possible because our mothers showed us how. I am beginning to see exactly how the letter preserves not just the mother’s knowledge, but her bond to the child. In presenting it, she is saying: break from this, use it, discard it if needed — but not from me.